Tag Archive: Veterans

” Joe Langdell was working as a junior accountant in Boston when he got the idea that he should join the Navy and go to sea. It was 1940 and America edged closer every day to joining the war that raged in Europe.

After proving his sea legs on the battleship New York, Langdell signed up. His college degree earned him a place in an officers’ training program. In March 1941, newly commissioned as an ensign, he reported for his first assignment: The USS Arizona, stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

By the end of the year, the mighty Arizona lay shattered beneath the harbor, sunk by Japanese bombers in the Dec. 7 attack that finally propelled the United States into World War II.

Langdell survived the attack at Pearl Harbor, along with 334 other Arizona crewmen, and devoted much of his later years to preserving the memory of a day that changed history.

” The lesson I’ve learned from that experience is that the 1,177 men entombed on the ship right now will never know the love of a wife or the joy of grandchildren,” he said in 2006, when his son, Ted, interviewed him on video at Pearl Harbor. “We all have to remember that they did not die in vain.”

Langdell died early Wednesday in a skilled nursing center in Yuba City, Calif. He was 100, the oldest living survivor of the Arizona. With his passing, just eight crewmen from the mighty battleship remain.”

” Even as Americans’ trust in government eroded in recent years, people kept faith in a handful of agencies and institutions admired for their steadiness in ensuring the country’s protection.

To safeguard the president, there was the solidity of the Secret Service. To stand vigil against distant enemies, the U.S. nuclear missile corps was assumed to be on the job. And to ward off threats to public health, the nation counted on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Now, in the space of just a few months, the reputations of all those agencies – as well as the Veterans Administration – have been tarred by scandal or tarnished by doubt. Maybe a public buffeted by partisan rhetoric and nonstop news should be used to this by now. But, with the CDC facing tough questions about its response to the Ebola outbreak, something feels different. Government is about doing collectively what citizens can’t do alone, but its effectiveness is premised on trust.

A year ago, with Washington shut down and trust in government near records lows, the CDC still won a 75 percent approval rating, the highest of any federal agency, a poll by the Pew Research Center found. But when CBS News surveyed Americans in mid-October, just 37 percent said the agency was doing a good or excellent job.”

There is no mystery to this lack of confidence in the State , When you politicize government agencies you immediately gain a near fifty percent disapproval right at the start . There is nowhere to go but down .

” The Homeland Security Department won a 66 percent approval rating a year ago. But that was before the Secret Service, which is a part of the agency, was caught in a number of lapses: among them, the agency’s failure to stop a man armed with a knife from scaling the fence and running into White House and the unchecked entry of an armed contractor onto an elevator with the president. In the new CBS news poll, just 38 percent of those questioned rated the Secret Service’s performance as good or excellent and 43 percent did so for its parent department.

The Veterans Administration was viewed favorably by 68 percent of those polled last year. But it too has since been swept up in a scandal over long wait times for veterans seeking care and records that were falsified to camouflage the problems. In the CBS poll, just 30 percent rated the VA as doing a good job.”

While the trend is not exactly a new thing there can be no doubt that it has been greatly accelerated over the past six years by the King of Politicization himself .

The trend away from big government and the subsequent move back towards local government control and accountability , while certainly unintentional on Obama’s part , will turn out to be his greatest accomplishment .

It takes a Statist to make people abhor the State .

The magnitude of the shift is even more impressive when one takes into account the massive effort exerted by the MSM these past six years in carrying “Dear Leader’s” water . Imagine where public sympathies would be if they weren’t bombarded on a daily basis with Statist propaganda and instead were offered the truth .

” When Valerie Riviello, a nurse at a Veterans Affairs facility in New York, saw the clinic restrain a sexual assault survivor to a bed for seven consecutive hours, she released the woman.

The next day, Ms. Riviello said, she was removed from her post as senior nurse manager and given a full-time desk job that prohibited her from contact with patients. She eventually was reprimanded and is facing a 30-day unpaid suspension for releasing the woman.

Now, Ms. Riviello is one of more than 50 whistleblowers who say the Veterans Affairs Department retaliated against them for trying to do their jobs. The complaints got backing last week from the Justice Department’s office of special counsel, which issued a stern warning for the VA to shape up.

Ms. Riviello said her reprimand for the November incident has cowed other nurses at the Albany Stratton VA Medical Center in New York.”

” The United States is reviving a law enforcement group to investigate those it designates as domestic terrorists, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

Following hate-motivated shootings such as the one at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, Missouri in April, federal prosecutors have pressed the need to coordinate intelligence about such criminals on a national level, Justice Department officials said.

The Department of Justice will reconstitute a task force that was originally formed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing but dissolved after the Sept. 11, 2001 hijacked plane attacks as law enforcement agencies focused on threats from militants abroad.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement that the United States remains concerned about threats from Islamic extremists, but the group will focus on other motives for attacks within U.S. borders.”

” Witnessing the unedifying spectacle put on by our masters in Washington this last week or so, we could only shake our heads sadly. And when we contemplated the action of ordinary citizens — those vets who disassembled the “Barrycades” erected in front of national monuments by a punitive Obama administration — we couldn’t help wondering whether the country was teetering towards a pre-revolutionary state. Take a look at this video showing hundreds of veterans confronting park police in riot gear — riot gear! — in front of the White House. How about this photo of a vet: he lost the bottom half of both legs fighting to protect us from foreign enemies, and here he is now, tearing down those Barrycades, fighting to protect our prerogatives as free citizens, protesting the arrogant, overweening actions of a political elite that more and more views us citizens as serfs:

There is a lot more to be said about the events of the last couple of weeks: the pseudo-shutdown, the ham-handed and ineffectual pontifications of John Boehner, the punitive actions of the increasingly lawless Obama administration. Pundits and markets the world over heaved a collective sigh of relief when this circus of intransigence, stupidity, and preening brinksmanship collapsed on itself yesterday, but what happened is not behind us: it is prelude, not history. We are in the midst of political, social, and moral realignment, the lineaments of which no one’s crystal ball is sufficiently prescient to delineate with anything more than guess and possibilities.

This is a large subject, better suited to a book than a blog post. But let me draw on “The Obamacare Disaster,” an essay by Conrad Black at NRO, to highlight some of the headwinds we face. First, a few data points:

The United States has 5 percent of the world’s people, 25 percent of its incarcerated people, and half of its trained lawyers (who now take about 10 percent of the GDP); the legal system is an embarrassment, and the criminal-justice system is a disgrace, in which prosecutors win 99.5 percent of their cases, 97 percent of them without a trial. The legislators of the country are ultimately responsible for this corruption of what the Constitution and Bill of Rights set up as a just and merciful Society of Laws. The terminal cancer of legal paralysis spreads every week of every year.

Can you doubt that what Black says is true? But what are “we the people” going to do about this metastasizing pathology? “

” Thousands of protesters have arrived at the World War II memorial this morning to protest the closure of the memorials during the government shutdown.The protestors have removed the barriers and have entered the monument.”

” Senators Mike Lee – Utah and Ted Cruz – Texas as well as Sarah Palin were among the crowd that chanted “Tear down these walls” and sang patriotic songs according to local news coverage from WTOP, as the barriers were removed.”

” Frustrated veterans and their families pushed through the barricades at the World War II memorial to protest the political stalemate between the Senate and the House of Representatives. Veterans then moved to the Lincoln Memorial, according to All-News 99.1 reporter Heather Curtis, where they were once again met by barricades.”

” If you were relying on the usual cable news channels, you probably wouldn’t even know this was happening today, but the much anticipated veterans’ march on DC has been well under way for a while now. At least the local news is covering it

The group was upset with the closure of memorials in Washington due to the shutdown stalemate. The original WWII protest was organized by the Million Vet March group, but took on a more political tone.”

As Jim Hoft reports , veterans took down the barry-cades from the Lincoln Memorial and relocated them at the White House where they more properly belong.

This report from PJMedia’s Tattler which includes numerous photos will give you a better idea of what is going on in DC . As you can see in all the tumult of the shutdown Benghazi and the men who gave their lives there are not forgotten .

Update 15:35 est : The Blaze has a report with photos and video of the NPS showing up in riot gear complete with mounted Troopers and armored cars .

We’ll continue to bring you more information as it becomes available to us .

Here’s another choice photo , this one from Frontpage magazine . Note the mounted troops in the background and the officer with all the flex-cuffs in the foreground . Did anyone see any of this sort of preparation at the Illegal Alien rally on the Mall earlier in the week ? We didn’t think so …

[Full Fight] 67 yr old crazy Vietnam Vet vs Oakland Street Thug

Published on Feb 17, 2013

” Gangster Thug tries to beat up elderly Vietnam Vet over a trivial argument. He calls him racist after he asked him to spit shine his shoes. *note the guy is crazy and the black guy did make some comments to him before this was filmed – he may have provoked the remark. “Vietnam Tom” is known to have black friends.”

Here’s an interview of the old gentleman after the fight …

Uploaded on Feb 21, 2010

” Interview with hero Vietnam vet Tommy Bruso who beat the shit out of a racist black man who attacked him on a bus”

” With a bomb strapped to his chest, one of the Boston Marathon suspects was killed early Friday after he and his accomplice robbed a 7-Eleven, shot a police officer to death, carjacked an SUV and hurled explosives out the window in an extraordinary firefight with law enforcement, authorities told NBC News.

The second suspect — the one in the white hat in photos released by the FBI — was on the loose, and police ordered people in the Boston suburb of Watertown to stay in their homes and businesses not to open. Boston shut down its buses and subway system for the hunt.

The suspects are brothers with the last name Tsarnaez, law enforcement officials told NBC News. Two law enforcement officials told NBC News that both men had international ties, had been in the United States about a year, were in their early 20s and had military experience.”

Lindsey Stone’s employer, Living Independently Forever (LIFE), issued a statement on their Facebook page on Wednesday announcing that they have released the two employees involved in the controversial incident.

“We wish to announce that the two employees recently involved in the Arlington Cemetery incident are no longer employees of LIFE. Again, we deeply regret any disrespect to members of the military and their families .

” The killing of Osama bin Laden is an accomplishment mentioned many times by President Obama and his administration. Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod once said the case for a second term could be summed up by saying, “General Motors
is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead.”

But even though the al-Qaida
mastermind is gone, many veterans of U.S. Special Operations are furious over how the Obama administration handled
the matter. “

“Vietnam veterans and the families of Vietnam veterans killed in action whose names are etched on the Wall were denied access to their memorial today, of all days,
Memorial Day.

The Vietnam Memorial was
shutdown, cleared and secured for
approximately 5 hours prior to Obama, his cronies and hand picked veterans for a 15 minute appearance by Obama. It’s obvious
it was all for show. After all, this is an election year.

Hundreds if not thousands of Vietnam veterans and families of Vietnam veterans killed in Vietnam stood in disbelief as Secret
Service, Park Police, Washington, DC Police, etc., blocked all access to the Vietnam Memorial and kept everyone approximately 100 yards away from their memorial for the
first time in the history of the Memorial so Obama could get some photos of him at the
Wall.
Veterans in uniforms stood in the heat angered as Obama makes them wait. It was a photo op at their expense and families of
those killed in Vietnam.”